That rent boy affair? It was because I was going bald

Going bald and a mid-life crisis led Mark Oaten to have an affair with a male prostitute, the disgraced Liberal Democrat MP claimed yesterday.

In a painfully-frank article, Mr Oaten also revealed that he had been seeing a psychiatrist "for several years" to tackle some of the reasons "behind which I did the things that led to my disgrace".

The MP for Winchester also appeared to pave the way to his standing down from the Commons at the next election by revealing that he has no desire to return to the Lib Dem front bench.

Revelations in January of an affair with a rent boy forced Mr Oaten, a married man with two children, to resign from the Lib Dems' home affairs team. Only two days earlier he had withdrawn as a candidate for the party leadership.

But in a highly confessional article for The Sunday Times yesterday, he sought to explain the background to his downfall.

The move made some party colleagues wince, not least as the MP was paid a fee for the article - reputedly in the region of £20,000. He is understood to have donated some of the money to charity.

In the article, he said "unhappiness at work" and turning 40 were among the factors which sparked the affair.

Mr Oaten, whom Tory MPs once feared would be the Lib Dems' best choice as new leader, said: "To political observers, it might have seemed that over the past few years, my career has gone from strength to strength.

"The reality was, however, that not a day went by when I didn't consider throwing in the towel."

But he insisted that this was part of a wider "mid-life crisis" over losing his youth, sparked by "my dramatic loss of hair in my 30s".

Balding men generally will hardly welcome the link between hair loss and having an affair with a rent boy.

But Mr Oaten wrote: "I became more and more obsessed by its (the hair's) disappearance. For me it was a public sign that my youth had ended."

• Sir Menzies Campbell, the Lib Dem leader, denied yesterday that the local election results were a failure for his party. He claimed that given the controversies of earlier this year - which included the scandal affecting Mr Oaten - the party had achieved "consolidation".

Privately, though, senior Lib Dems confess that their MPs representing the South of England are under threat from a rejuvenated Tory party under David Cameron.